IN FRONT of the luxurious Carlton Hotel in Cannes is a life-sized model of the Silver Surfer that looks like it could gracefully shoot off into the stratosphere at any moment. As workmen hoisted huge billboards into place along the seafront on Monday, the same seemed true of the Cannes Film Festival, just days away from launching into its 60th edition. You could feel the excitement building. The promise of magic was in the air.
Of course, Cannes has always been special, but it is an annual fixture that I always approach with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. When I tell people I am coming here, they look envious. Given the seductive image that the festival presents to the world, it is little wonder. But, as much as I try to explain to them what it really feels like, the established image of Cannes as a sun-drenched paradise of bikini beauties, movie stars, models, endless parties, palm trees, glistening yachts and, oh yes, cinema, always wins out. Protesting to friends that covering the festival is actually hard work is futile. You just sound like a Grinch.
Seen from a distance, Cannes in May looks like the most glamorous location on Earth. And it is true: it can be a thrilling, exhilarating and downright sexy place to be when the world's cinema industry rolls into town, like some super-starry travelling circus, with its own versions of freaks and clowns, daredevil high-wire artists and firebreathers. Part of the fun is discovering who will play what role as the event spools out.
Here is where the hopeful and the hopeless come together; where crassness collides with sophistication; and dreams are made and shattered. Cannes is the film industry in a nutshell, a place, the novelist Irwin Shaw wrote, that attracts "the artists and pseudo-artists, the businessmen, the con men, the buyers and sellers, the peddlers, the whores, the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year's heroes, the year's failures". It is like a Hogarth sketch come to life - only in Cannes people are more likely to be drinking Champagne than gin and the only horses getting flogged are dead ones.
Maybe I should just lighten up. As a freelance film journalist, though, I have always found the festival a gruelling experience. It is like a boot camp where you go each year to test your stamina and endurance, and where each passing day offers new challenges to your fitness, health and even, occasionally, your sanity. As fatigue and hunger set in because there is often not enough time to eat during the day, and your legs begin to ache from the constant rushing between interviews and morning-to-midnight screenings, you wonder why you put yourself through it.
Often maddening, too, is the security, which has been tightened over the years amid fears, presumably, of terrorism and film piracy. There are bag searches at key locations by guards with handheld metal detectors, and mobile phones with cameras are seized before some screenings. Want an unwatchably fuzzy copy of the latest Kim Ki-duk film? Sorry, no can do. This Big Brother atmosphere reached absurd levels last year, when the audience at a screening of An Inconvenient Truth I attended was filmed by suited men with night vision cameras. Surely they are barking up the wrong tree. A lot of piracy is done by people inside the film industry itself, not by journalists.
Yet, despite its many flaws and frustrations, Cannes has convinced me that it is the place to which I have to make a pilgrimage each year, to worship at the altar of cinema. I am votary and addict rolled into one. Sometimes I long to be a heretic, to go clean for at least a year, but the annual siren's call keeps luring me back. And along with thousands of other journalists (3,502 attended the 2006 bash), I make the trip to the South of France and the film festival of film festivals.
Once in Cannes, reality starts to slip away. The festival is a world weirdly unto itself. The films in the Official Selection and parallel threads, such as Un Certain Regard, come from around the planet. But, from the 16 to the 27 May, the UK, the US, China, or wherever, might just as well be Narnia, Middle Earth or Laputa. Everything away from the Croisette - the resort's main esplanade, the barometer for what's hot and what's not - becomes a hazy blur. Cannes is the only thing that is real, the only thing that matters. It invades every sinew of your body and every cell of your brain.
There is something to be said for escaping from one's daily routine, of course. But how pleasant your Cannes experience as a journalist is depends to some extent on where you are in the hierarchy imposed on the media by the festival organisers, and signified by a colour-coded pass denoting your level of importance. The French put you in your place the moment you arrive, and expect you to stay there. If you're viewing Cannes from the top, its allure is likely to remain intact. Experienced from nearer the bottom, however, it can disappear faster than a 20 note in one of the Croisette's overpriced bars. Believe me, I've seen it from both sides.
So why go to Cannes? The answer is simple: the films. Every year offers new discoveries and a better than average chance that you will see something great, or almost great. The festival's pedigree is evident in the list of past Palme d'Or winners, which include M*A*S*H, If..., La Dolce Vita, Viridiana and Taxi Driver. It is not surprising, then, that passions run high in Cannes, and sometimes a kind of madness erupts around a film considered to be hot. Journalists jostling to get into a screening of 1994's eventual Palme d'Or winner, Pulp Fiction, actually came to blows. But that is Cannes: it gets inside you and makes you crazy.
That same passion can make the festival a minefield for film-makers. When Richard Kelly's follow up to Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, screened last year, critics set upon it like blood-crazed hounds. They hissed and booed it, and wrote scathing reviews. It killed the film. Southland Tales still has not seen the light of day anywhere, and is unlikely ever to be released in the form shown in Cannes. If at all.
Of course, poor reviews did not stop 2006's wretched opening movie, The Da Vinci Code, from becoming a worldwide hit. But then nothing short of burning every copy of the film could have done that. The press conference with the cast and director was a tense affair, but it did at least produce a wonderful bit of mischief from Sir Ian McKellen who, when questioned about the Catholic Church's opposition to the film's suggestion that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered a child, replied: "I know the Catholic Church has problems with gay people and I thought this would be absolute proof that Jesus was not gay."
Press conferences are often more entertaining than the films themselves. Vincent Gallo's turn in 2003, for example, was so candid and provocative that for a moment you almost forgot that his film, The Brown Bunny, a tediously solipsistic motorcycle movie culminating in the director/star receiving a blow job from Chloë Sevigny, was one of the worst films ever to grace (disgrace?) the competition.
Cannes thrives on controversy and shock, and sparks could fly this year when Michael Moore hits the Côte d'Azur with his skewering of the American healthcare system, Sicko. In 2004, his assault on George W. Bush, Fahrenheit 9/11, was awarded the Palme d'Or by the Tarantino-led jury, in a decision that was widely considered political. Now under investigation by the US treasury department for filming in Cuba in violation of the US's travel ban, Moore's appearance on the Croisette is expected to be fiery.
Sicko is screening out of competition, along with Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen. Among those in contention for the main prize are former winners, including: the Coen brothers, whose Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men is said to be their best film in years; Quentin Tarantino, with an extended cut of his Grindhouse instalment Death Proof; and Gus van Sant with teenage killer movie Paranoid Park.
While it's anyone's guess who will win the Palme d'Or, the festival opened on Wednesday with one certainty: that the inaugural film could not be worse than The Da Vinci Code. Then, commerce triumphed over art, and the festival ended up with oeuf on its visage.
Last year's jury president, Wong Kar Wai, inaugurated this year's junket with his first English-language production, My Blueberry Nights - a film which at least supplied the mix of sexiness and glamour for which the festival is known. Starring singer Norah Jones in her acting debut, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, Jude Law and David Strathairn, the film looks as sumptuous and seductive as you would expect from the director of In the Mood for Love and 2046. However, there is nothing beneath the film's richly textured visuals, while the characters' banal observations on love and relationships are sub Sex and the City. The press gave the film a lukewarm reception at a screening on Wednesday morning and opinions have been mixed.
The challenge of making the film, Wong Kar Wai said, was working in a second language. But really the greatest one was probably delivering the movie on time. Notorious for going over schedule on his productions, Wong threw the Cannes programme into disarray in 2004 when he arrived a day late with his sci-fi drama, 2046. "I thought it would be good to come as the opening film because usually my films come late," he laughed. He almost did not make it, though. Wong was still editing the film earlier this week, he said, and only arrived in Cannes with the print on Tuesday. "Everyone is surprised," he laughed.
So the 60th Cannes Film Festival is now officially open. Who will be the winners and the losers, the freaks and the clowns, the heroes and the villains is yet to be revealed. Am I happy to be here? Ask me on the 27th.
• Stephen Applebaum will be filing further reports for The Scotsman's arts pages throughout the Cannes Film Festival.
Top ten contenders for this year's Palme d'Or
THE MAN FROM LONDON
Tilda Swinton stars in Béla Tarr's black-and-white adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel. The Hungarian auteur isn't big on story lines: here, a lonely switchman at a seaside railway station witnesses a murder and accidentally acquires a suitcase full of money. The rest is shrouded in mystery.
MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS
Hong Kong's hippest director, Wong Kar Wai, makes his English-language debut with Grammy-winner Norah Jones in the lead. A mysterious woman and sometime waitress (with a penchant for blueberry pie) crisscrosses America in search of the secret of true love. Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and Tim Roth also star.
PARANOID PARK
Another slice of teen life from the unpredictable Gus Van Sant. Adapting a novel by Blake Nelson, the director calls this "sort of Crime and Punishment in high school". A skateboarding adolescent called Alex (15-year-old unknown Gabe Nevins) accidentally kills a security guard. Should he turn himself in?
LE SCAPHANDRE ET LE PAPILLON (THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY)
A French-language biopic from painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel. Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) is editor-in-chief at French Elle when he suffers a massive stroke. The only part of his body he can move is his left eye. Using the latest technology, he "blinks" out a memoir which becomes an instant best-seller. He dies two days after its publication.
WE OWN THE NIGHT
Writer/director James Gray's long-awaited follow-up to The Yards. It's 1980s New York and a nightclub manager must choose between his cop-dominated family and his Russian mob bosses. When his brother becomes a target, the pair decide to attack. Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg play the brothers, with Robert Duvall as dad.
DEATH PROOF
Grindhouse Redux - Quentin Tarantino's amended half of the slasher/zombie double bill. Four chatty lovelies, out for a drive, are dispatched by a deranged stuntman called Mike who uses his car as a weapon of destruction. Then the film begins again and Mike comes up against a girl quartet with a lot more pedal power. Kurt Russell has fun as the predatory Mike, as do a gaggle of talented young actresses - including Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Tracie Thoms and real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell - who get to do plenty more than talk 'n' squawk as Mike's prey.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
The Coen Brothers get their teeth into Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel. A young, hard-up Vietnam vet stumbles across some dead bodies, a cache of heroin and $2 million. Various assassins are soon out to get him and his wife; the grizzled local sheriff does his best to offer protection. Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones are the good guys, while Javier Bardem shines as a gun-crazy Mexican. Scotland's Kelly Macdonald plays Brolin's wife.
ZODIAC
Se7en director David Fincher explores the (real) life and legacy of a serial killer. It's the late 1960s and four men - a detective, a lawyer, a journalist and a cartoonist - become hopelessly obsessed with uncovering the identity of a man as keen on leaving cryptic messages as killing at random in the Bay Area.
PERSEPOLIS
A black and white cartoon, based on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel memoir about growing up in post-revolutionary Iran. Marji tries to make sense of a world where beloved uncles disappear and neighbours denounce each other. Aged 14, she leaves her family to go into self-imposed exile in Austria. Catherine Deneuve voices Satrapi's mother and the actress's daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, voices Marji.
UNE VIEILLE MAITRESSE (AN OLD MISTRESS)
A costume drama from the director of Romance, Catherine Breillat. As in the 19th-century source novel, a charming aristocrat hopes to marry a young heiress, but his plans are sent awry by the reappearance of an ex-lover - a rebellious Spanish courtesan of "bewitching ugliness", played by Asia Argento.
• More InformationTrue Cannes junkies should visit
www.festival-cannes.fr Go to the "Festival 2007" link and click on The Daily for news and pictures - it is updated several times a day.
